Diffusions in Architecture: Artificial Intelligence and Image Generators
by Matias del Campo, Lev Manovich
Imago Mundi Imaginibus Mundi
Cesare Battelli
The recent introduction in the international scene of Artificial Intelligence Laboratories reopens a reflection on the role of imagination applied to machines and the paradox that it is precisely from the most advanced technology that we see ourselves retracting the meaning of imagination‐imaginary.
From an onto‐gnoseological point of view, imagination (not to be understood in this case as the production of unreal worlds) has a long history that spans much of the history of art and philosophy from ancient times to the moment when in the 18th century, at the beginning of post‐Cartesian modernity, it ends being the gnoseological foundation of all modern culture. The imagination, specifically not only the transitive imagination, but also the active one (from Synesius to Marsilius Ficino), during the 1400s, was considered the magical foundation of connection between opposite worlds, between intelligible and sensible, macro and microcosm. For Ficino, for example, imagination converts the language of the senses into a fantastic language, so that reason can grasp and understand the phantoms deposited in memory, while active imagination plays an intermediary role between the two shores (sensible and intelligible), activating a world of its own. The image as the union of the particular and the universal is configured first and foremost as a symbol, a figure that is both concrete and universal, abstract and figurative at the same time.
These ...